viz.

(Image Credit:  Time Magazine)

Following on the heels of Megan, Cate, and Elizabeth, I've been monitoring media coverage of the disaster in Japan and coming across some interesting points for debate.  I found this Time cover shortly after reading an anonymous letter to Talking Points Memo by a Japanese scholar critiquing Western media coverage of the Fukushima nuclear power plant: 

All good things must come to an end, and so it is with summer; and I know it's the end of summer, because people are sending me urgent messages requesting a description of the course I plan on teaching this fall. What I've come up with so far is a course on "Crisis Rhetoric". One of the primary questions the course will seek to answer is whether there is such a thing as a legitimately, discretely definable "crisis rhetoric." How does the art of persuasion change in situations of crisis, and how can the art of persuasion be used to create a sense of crisis in any given public sphere?